Requiem

by Frances Itani

  I was also thinking of Okuma-san telling me once that there were many different ways to draw. That it was all right to change the shapes I made on the page, that it was all right to alter them from what they started out to be. What I drew did not have to be the object that happened to be in front of me. It did not have to have the same edges or shape. I could look at the object as a starting point and use my imagination in any way I wished.

  It was peaceful in that place, even with the roar of river beside us. And just as I was attempting to create an outline of the island, I heard footsteps crunching on the grit of the pathway that descended the embankment. At once, I recognized the father of the boy who had drowned. He stood near us and stared out over the river, which, when I looked, now appeared sullen and dark. He and Okuma-san quietly exchanged a few words and I heard them discussing the paper that everyone had to sign, choosing one path or another into the future. There was to be a meeting later that afternoon, in the community room in the schoolhouse. “Alone or together, we are helpless,” the man said. “There is no place we are wanted.”

  “But it is pointless to allow the rage,” Okuma-san said. “If we allow the rage, it will consume us.”

  The man shrugged and then turned to me and asked if he could see what I was drawing.

  His request took me by surprise, and gave my drawing a sudden importance I did not want it to have. I was aware of his sadness, which could be seen on his face, but I became unsatisfied with what I was doing and did not want to show the page in my sketch pad to him or to anyone else. I closed the pad and turned it face down on the rock, and even put my hands over it, fearing that he would pick it up, or that he would take it away from me and examine the drawing.

  Of course, he did no such thing. He smiled sadly and stood on shore for a few more minutes, looking out over the water. Then he turned and made his way back up the path.

  After he left, I asked Okuma-san which family I was to be a part of when the important paper was signed.

  “You are my family now,” said Okuma-san. “You and I will remain in Canada. This is our country, and we will not be forced to leave.”

  I was glad to hear this, but I wondered about my first family. I did not want them to be on the other side of the wide blue stretch I had seen on the globe at school when I’d spun it around and stopped it abruptly, my finger landing on the Pacific Ocean. I did not want them to be so far away that I would never see them again.

  Later that afternoon, after Okuma-san and I climbed the embankment and returned to the shack, I ripped out the page I had worked on by the river and crumpled it in my hand. I threw the drawing into the fire and burned it, right after Okuma-san left for the meeting. The men were to have one last discussion about the dispersal policy and the paper that had to be signed.

  The next day, Hiroshi and Keiko came to me at school, and I learned that First Father had decided to take his chances and had signed the paper, agreeing to be sent to Japan, over which bombing raids were now in progress. He was going to take Mother and Keiko and Hiroshi with him. He had been planning this for some time, Keiko told me, because she had begged to have a haircut that was more stylish, with shorter hair. First Father refused to allow this because he said she would have to have long hair when they went to Japan so that she would fit in with girls her age and not look like a foreigner. She recounted all of this in the schoolyard, and then she told me what had happened next.

  Mother, in a surprising and unexpected burst of defiance, declared that she was not going to leave. What would she do in a foreign place, even if it was the country of the ancestors? Hadn’t she been born in Vancouver? Hadn’t she attended school in that city as a child? Wasn’t she entitled to raise the children in their own country?

  The final comment had come from next door. Ba and Ji heard the argument and came in to take Mother’s side. Because they were elders, they had no worries about interfering. Ji declared that any child sent to Japan after the end of the war would be in danger of dying of illness or starvation.

  Mother, given support from the elders, would not change her mind. “Whether we are wanted here or not,” she said, “we should stay. If we move, we won’t see Bin again. Okuma-san will never agree to go to Japan. He has already said.”

  Keiko’s eyes were puffy from crying, her cheekbones flushed. She said she’d been frightened when Mother’s voice was raised in argument against First Father. Hiroshi, too, was unhappy about what was going on around him. But Father had signed the paper, and now the paper had to be unsigned.

  Mother, with Ba and Ji’s help, won the argument. A new paper was signed and my first family was not among those escorted to the coast to board a ship that sailed to Japan after the end of the war. But as Okuma-san later explained, the politicians were successful in ridding the country of thousands of Japanese Canadians. In the spring of 1946, the first shipload of exiles, immunized and with papers signed, sailed away from the West Coast and headed for Japan. In all, some four thousand people left Canada. Some were from our camp. One man told everyone he was glad to leave after being interned for years. He hoped for a life better than the one he’d been living since the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Other families were caught up in the atmosphere of chaos and had signed the paper out of fear.

  First Father now became undecided about what to do next, and I often saw him outside, pacing around, engaged in bitter arguments and rantings with the men who remained. He was not the only one who had lost everything he had ever worked for. His boat and licence, his business, the house he had built in our fishing village, his honour and now, perhaps, his country. He had received a letter from his brother, our uncle Kenji, who had been sent to a road camp just after we’d been removed from the coast in early 1942. Uncle Kenji had spent eighteen months separated from his family, who were living in an internment camp in New Denver. He was with them now because he had finally been permitted to join them the previous year.

  Uncle Kenji wanted to return to fishing, but that was impossible. Like the rest of us, he wasn’t allowed back on the coast. In the letter he wrote to First Father, he said that he’d heard about work being available farther south, maybe at a sawmill not far from where we were now. He did not want to leave British Columbia, which had always been his home. None of us had seen Uncle Kenji since we’d been taken from our homes in 1942.

  I worried about all of this. For a second time, we had to move out of our homes. One family after another began to depart. Some arranged to meet relatives who had been detained in other locations. Some left on the running boards of trucks that were filled to capacity with people on the move. Most were leaving the province and heading east, disappearing to different parts of the country—everywhere but to the West Coast. None of us was allowed back there—not yet. That would not happen for another four years. When Japanese Canadians were finally allowed to vote in 1949, that was when we were allowed to return to the coast. But by then, of course, most had been dispersed elsewhere.

  For now, the places people moved to were mainly chosen by chance. Someone had heard that a job might be found. Two rooms were offered in a city in Manitoba or Ontario. A housekeeper was wanted here or there. A minister from a church arranged for several families to move and found work for them on Ontario farms. A mushroom factory was hiring and said it would take internees from the camps. The sugar-beet fields in Alberta needed more workers. Some older Japanese children were being accepted into regular high schools. University students were in classes in the East. A Japanese doctor had been asked to work in a rural area that had no hospital or physician.

  In the camp, in the middle of August 1945, this is how we learned more about hate, and about victory over Japan and about what would become known as VJ Day.

  On a hot day, cars from across the river were heard approaching the camp. Most of the adults, including Okuma-san, were working in the communal gardens on the other side of the road. Some of the men were down at the river, fishing. Hiroshi was up on the Bench, picking currants. Keiko was
with me because she had come to borrow a book from Okuma-san’s shelf and had stayed on to read and keep me company. Keiko had short hair now, and shiny black bangs like Mother’s, but without the curls on her forehead. She was laughing out loud while she was reading a story in the book.

  There was suddenly so much noise from the road, we went to the doorway to see what was happening. Some of the mothers were running towards the shacks and bringing their children inside. We became frightened because many cars driven by men from the town had begun to circle through camp. Keiko and I banged the door shut and pushed the table against it and pulled the curtains tight so it would be dark inside the room. The two of us kneeled on a bench by the window and watched through a tiny crack. Our whole camp, within minutes, appeared to be deserted, but we were all there, hiding inside.

  The men in the cars drove round and round, back and forth on the road and up and down the rows between shacks, blasting their horns and shouting through the car windows they had rolled down. “Have you heard the news? We dropped the big bomb and we won the war against you goddamned Japs!” This went on for about fifteen minutes until, finally, the drivers and shouters seemed to tire of roaring through a silent camp. The cars turned and went honking back to the bridge and towards town.

  We knew then that Japan had surrendered, and we were glad, too. A few weeks later, during the first week of September, we heard about the formal ceremonies and final surrender of the Japanese military aboard the American battleship USS Missouri. But on that hot August day, when the news first came to the camp, we had been forced to hide behind the walls of our shacks because Canada, our country, was no longer at war.

  Newspapers were brought from across the river. News of the terrible bombs that had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had greatly disturbed everyone, and no one knew the extent of the destruction. People were being more cautious about their decisions now. Okuma-san decided that he and I would stay on until the end of the next school year, even though we were now free to move east. He was watching and waiting to see what would happen next. He sent letters to Vancouver friends he’d had before the war, knowing that he would not be able to teach or even travel back to the West Coast. He hoped that someone might be able to help him find work in some interior location of the province, even though we were being pressured to move east of the Rockies.

  Hiroshi and Keiko and I met frequently up on the slope behind the camp and talked and played Jan-Ken-Po, and told one another of any changes or plans that had been overheard within the two families. But nothing changed for a while. Until Ba and Ji left.

  Ba and Ji had been like family to all of us, but we had to make the best of their departure. They cried when it was time to leave, but they laughed, too, because they hoped to be reunited soon with their daughter’s family. Sachi and Tom were now living in Nebraska, where they’d moved from Manzanar, and their baby had been born, a son named after Ji. The baby had Ji’s first and last names, since Tom had taken Sachi’s surname when they’d married in Vancouver before our expulsion from the coast.

  Ba and Ji planned to travel across the country as far as Winnipeg. They would stay there with a family friend until Sachi could arrange for them to join her. Ba wore a grey dress and black gloves and a black hat with a short veil over her forehead for the train journey. The letters from Manzanar she had once stored in her pocket had been replaced by a photograph of the new grandson. She kept the photo of the baby in an envelope and pulled it out of the pocket of her dress to show everyone one more time before she left.

  The numbers in camp were steadily shrinking, but First Father carried on with the gardening, as did Okuma-san. The sale of tomatoes was still bringing in enough money to support us. The school stayed open for another year, with one Japanese teacher and seventeen students. The Caucasian teacher, Mr. Blackwell, had gone back to Vancouver at the end of the war. And then, finally, in 1946, it was decided that the school would have to be closed at the end of the term. There would be only a few families remaining in the fall, not enough to keep the building open any longer.

  Okuma-san and I remained in our shack until the end of the summer of 1946, after most of the tomatoes had been harvested and sold. Ying had been bringing newspapers from across the river all the while, and Okuma-san read these and told me that we must be patient because it looked as if some of us would be able to remain in the province after all. A few Caucasians had begun to stick up for us and there had been public objections to politicians who were trying to force us to relocate. Employers had come forward to say that they needed help on farms and in their orchards and sawmills and canning factories. They needed to keep up with demand and production, and there was a shortage of workers.

  People from the town across the river began to come over to our camp, offering a few dollars to take the deserted shacks apart so they could salvage the lumber. It was around this time that my first family announced that they would be leaving. Uncle Aki and Auntie Aya would leave with them. Auntie Aya did not want to be far from Mother, who had helped her so much throughout the years in the camp.

  The evening before they left, Mother came to our shack and knocked on the door. She brought with her an armful of clothing that Hiroshi had outgrown. She also brought a basket of food that could not be taken the next day. After Okuma-san and I had put these things away, she asked me to come for a walk.

  My mother and I crossed the dirt road and went past the gardens, all the way to the far edge of the cliff that looked down over the great river. There was a narrow path along the edge, and we walked back and forth on this path. She took my hand in hers and I remembered, afterwards, how warm and small her own hand had been. We stopped several times to look at the wildflowers, and when we came close to the gardens again, she exclaimed over the huge size of the pale green cabbages still left in the rows.

  It was a warm evening, and Mother had on a yellow cotton dress with a raised pattern around its bottom edge that reminded me of delicate rows of puffed corn. She wore a pair of sandals that First Father had made for her from leather, and as we walked, she stopped every few minutes and held my shoulder for balance while she shook out the sandy grit that was trapped under her toes.

  “Bin,” she said. “You know that you will always be my son. Okuma-san has adopted you because your first father thought it was best. But I will always love you and we will see each other again.”

  “When?” I asked. “When will we see each other?” I knew that there was little money, and that people like us did not go travelling.

  “When we can,” she said, and she looked down over the river as if it were far away and not flowing swiftly below us, at the bottom of the cliff. “We will see each other when we can.”

  In the morning, Mother, First Father, Keiko, Hiroshi, Uncle Aki and Auntie Aya were picked up by Ying in his truck. Keiko was trying not to cry, but tears rolled down her cheeks. She looked so much older now, with her short haircut. Hiroshi and I said goodbye, and he threw out a hand in Jan-Ken-Po and I did the same, and we both did Scissors so neither of us won. Hiroshi looked away, towards the town on the other side of the river. First Father put a hand on my shoulder and a low sound came from his throat that sounded like “Huuuh.”

  The goodbyes were not prolonged. I watched them push their bundles up into the back of Ying’s truck and I watched as they climbed up beside them. First Father thumped the cab to let Ying know he could pull away. Okuma-san stood beside me. Mother had her navy blue coat over her arm, the same coat she had worn when we’d arrived almost five years earlier.

  First Father did not look back. I saw him only in profile as he departed. He looked resolute and unrelenting about this decision and any he would make in the future. The last image I held of the others was of them looking back at me as if they were trying to fix me in memory. Their faces became smaller and smaller and finally disappeared as Ying’s truck bounced and rattled along the dirt road. Ying drove them to the bus station across the bridge, and they were gone.

 
Two weeks later, we received a letter from Mother telling us they had found a place to live in a valley about forty miles south of the camp. First Father and Uncle Aki were working in a sawmill and they would stay there until they were able to save enough money to move again. Uncle Kenji and his family had arrived there, too. There was a school a mile down the road, she wrote, and Hiroshi and Keiko—now called Henry and Kay—would be attending with our cousins, in the fall. That was all she said, apart from giving an address care of the local post office.

  This postwar move undertaken by my first family was the beginning of many. Uncle Aki and Auntie Aya stayed in the mill town until 1950. They waited a year after they were allowed to vote in federal elections—which also meant that they were free to go to the coast—and then moved to Vancouver. It had become clear that Auntie Aya needed help from the kind of doctors that were available in a large city.

  First Father and his brother, Uncle Kenji, both accomplished fishermen, drifted for years in the interior of the province, from village to town, from town to village, always far from the coast, seeking work in mills and orchards, staying overnight in flea-infested bunk-houses, trying to find places to live, making repeated and thwarted attempts to search for what would never be recovered. My first family moved so many times, I had to check the envelopes that arrived from Mother and Keiko to learn their latest location. It was only after Hiroshi and Keiko and our cousins had grown up and left home that First Father and Mother moved one last time, even farther inland, to the outskirts of Kamloops, near the North and South Thompson Rivers, where the two of them remained. Uncle Kenji followed right behind them, and had a house nearby.